Author: Brandon

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Does your red-letter Bible misquote Christ?

A long-standing feature request from users of SwordSearcher is “words of Christ in red.” One of the things I’m working on for the next release is adding red-letter data to the KJV module so that users can (optionally) have the Lord’s words colored differently than regular text.

One difficulty with this is that the various red-letter Bibles don’t agree 100% on which words should be attributed to Jesus. As my “source” I am using an Old Scofield Reference Bible, and I am comparing it to a Thompson Chain Reference Bible to ensure no errors.  Thanks to the work of Bill Bonnell I have a list of verses to which I can compare mine (automatically). After reconciling some differences, I’m satisfied that I’ve got an accurate data set.

Anyway, to the real point of this post:

If you have a red-letter Bible, open it up to John 8:51 and 8:52.

The Lord says:

Joh 8:51 Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.

Then they respond:

Joh 8:52 Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death.

Notice the subtle difference — they changed “see” to “taste of” when quoting the Lord*.

We have three different “red-letter Bibles” in our home, and one of them actually shows this misquotation by the Jews in verse 52 as red letters, incorrectly attributing what they said to Christ.

Ooooops!

*And for you folks thinking there might be something more going on “in the Greek,” no, there isn’t.  The word translated as “see” (theoreo) in verse 51 is not the same as the word translated “taste” (geuomai) in verse 52. Coloring the misquotation as red is simply an error, probably made by a careless editor.

Keyword Stuffer SpamPro Elite Gold

Web marketing seems to come down to one of two things:

1. Stay on the cusp of search engine manipulation. Keep one step ahead of Google so that you can have well-ranking web pages that customers will blunder on to, only to have to click an AdWord link to get to what they were looking for in the first place. Or,

2. Work steadily to create legitimately useful content, and hope the search engines will eventually notice its value and send users your way.

After looking around for a while, it seems that all of the keyword research tools available cater to the get-rich-quick school of thought (number 1 above). The “Keyword this-and-that” programs have mile-long web pages full of infomercial style sales pitches, promising that once you buy their software you’ll be an instant internet mogul. They make my skin crawl just scrolling down the pages.

I can’t seem to find much for those of us in group #2.

My main goal in web marketing is to help my customers find me.  I know they are out there. The trick is writing articles and pages that word their problems in the same ways they do, so they’ll find them.

I’ve decided that I should develop my own keyword research software. I have some very specific needs in mind that I don’t see being filled by these programs.

What about you?  If your work includes web marketing, have you ever thought “hey, I need something that does X?” Let me know.

Global Warming Bureaucrats and Politicians

The majority of global warming research is funded by government grants.

These government grants provide excellent job security for researchers. And since they come from the government, an entity not subject to the natural forces of the private sector, results are not particularly important.

Global warming scare mongering gives government agents (politicians and bureaucrats) another foundation on which to seize power. (Any time politicians preempt the private sector and take away personal freedoms, they are transferring power from the individual to the collective.)

Global warming scare mongers and the government that funds them are in perfect symbiosis and are worthy of the utmost suspicion.

So what happens when this research is scrutinized?

From the American Thinker:

“Last week, Hansen, NASA’s lead scientist on global warming, penned a rather strange ad hominem attack against critics that questioned the validity of his work in the wake of corrections prompted by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit http://www.climateaudit.org/…”

Software Has Limits

As I write this, somewhere around 8,000 people are stuck in LAX waiting to go through customs because of a computer glitch.

Frankly, I am amazed this doesn’t happen more often. This reminds me of a book I recently read called The Limits of Software. Anyone who is curious about why computers and software so frequently don’t work properly would benefit from reading it.

The Limits of Software is a sort of docu-drama in book form about the massive failed attempt at upgrading the Federal Aviation Administration’s ancient computer systems. The event is a case-study proving that all the money in the world can’t make the impossible happen. But since the government can just spend, spend, spend, they sure did give the impossible a try. I highly recommend this book for programmers or anyone who wants to understand what kind of problems programmers are always trying to solve.

What it all boils down to is that software is a means of describing abstract human thought for computers to understand and implement in reality. It will never be perfect.

No consolation for the 8,000 poor folks stranded in LAX, I know.

Good news goes under-reported

Presumptive presidential candidate Fred Thompson writes:

“Since the spring of 2003, the economy has had average growth of over 3%, 8.2 million jobs have been created, and the inflation rate has stayed low.  The current unemployment rate, 4.6%, is a full percentage point below what it averaged during the 1990s, and there have been 47 consecutive months (almost four years) of job growth.  In the last three years, workers’ salaries have risen by $1.2 trillion, or $8,000 per worker, and consumer confidence recently reached its highest level in almost six years.”

Since the mainstream media supports Democrat politicians, good economic news is generally ignored when the credit goes to Bush’s economic policies. Left-wing politicians only have two things they can run on right now:

  1. “Soak the rich” class warfare. The economy is doing very well, people are keeping more of their own money because of lower federal taxes, and of course, the rich are getting richer. So the left-wing politician promises to punish those who are creating the most wealth in the economy. To wit: even though the government makes more money in taxes on every gallon of gas than the oil companies do, they’ve recently passed even more taxes on oil companies. Despite the fact that only customers pay corporate taxes (duh!), this works well with the populists who like to see the “rich” getting a sticking to.  Never mind that most Americans own stock in oil companies in their retirement plans — you don’t have to explain that to people.
  2. The war in Iraq. Americans don’t like losing wars and would generally rather leave than stay if they perceive a cause to be lost. So the mainstream media is doing its best to under-report recent accomplishments in Iraq in order to help their preferred candidates. But this is beginning to fail.

Still, despite a roaring economy and the fact that we are actually starting to achieve success in Iraq, the whole “get me mine” thing is tough to beat. Even though the Democrat politicians in Washington have bet the farm on US defeat overseas and may end up eating crow, it’s tough to see how this will make any difference when envy-pandering is so powerful (in the form of universal health care, higher taxes “for the rich,” etc.) I hope I’m wrong.